The disclosure generally relates to an ESD protection circuit and, more particularly, to a cross-domain ESD protection circuit.
In an integrated circuit, the ESD protection circuit is typically connected with other circuits in a parallel connection to provide a discharging path for those circuits. The capacitors in the conventional ESD protection circuit are typically realized with MOS capacitors in order to reduce the circuit area.
However, in many advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes, the MOS capacitor might easily suffer the gate leakage problem because the gate oxide layer of the MOS capacitor has become much thinner than before. As a result, the ESD protection circuit may erroneously act during normal operations of other circuits, thereby causing malfunction of the integrated circuit or rendering the integrated circuit to be unable to conduct normal operations.